


An Island in the Sea

by sajastar



Series: Talking to Yourself [4]
Category: Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, I guess? not totally sure what that tag implies, Recovery, as per usual, fun with pronouns, looking for each other, qpr, queerplatonic Eddie Brock/Venom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-05
Updated: 2018-11-05
Packaged: 2019-08-19 02:40:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16525754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sajastar/pseuds/sajastar
Summary: My contribution to the growing body of "Eddie and Venom find each other post-movie" fics.Venom gets to know the local bird life. Eddie accosts strangers on the street. Even when they succeed, it's going to be harrowing.





	An Island in the Sea

**Author's Note:**

> CW: a cat gets eaten alive. It's not described in detail. If you want to skip it, it's the paragraph right after the thing about horses.

Separation was a cold shock within the searing heat of their body—now just Venom’s body—burning away. 

They plunged into the water. Venom tried to reach out for Eddie, but it was weak and disoriented. The current swept it away, and it drifted through the bay for hours. Luckily, the water had a lower concentration of molecular oxygen than the atmosphere. When it became too much, Venom caught hold of a passing shad.

From there, it jumped from fish to fish, not sure which way to go, until eventually it floundered too close to the surface and found a gull. It spent the next two days in birds, gliding aimlessly over the alien city, living off trash and the occasional rat or sparrow as it scanned the streets for a glimpse of Eddie. Eventually, it gave it up as a lost cause. It would never spot one man among the hundreds of thousands. 

But humans, it knew, were a social species, with multitudes of interpersonal connections and a keen memory for faces. Better than Venom’s, anyway—all humans looked the same to it. Venom picked a human at random, latched on, and started rifling through her memories for clues that could lead it to Eddie. When it turned up nothing, it passed on to a new human and tried again.

\---

Eddie hated being in his apartment. 

It wasn’t hard to rationalize avoiding the place. Bullet holes riddled the walls. Half his furniture now sat in the dumpster out back. Two of his windows were covered by plastic sheeting that did nothing to keep the chill out. 

That had nothing to do with why he hated being in his apartment.

When he wasn’t cleaning up, he had taken to spending most of his time in the coffee shop down the street. He didn’t really have the money to keep buying coffee, and sometimes the staff gave him side-eye when he nursed a cup of their cheapest americano for five or six hours, but God, anything was better than the silence. He’d even be grateful his shithead neighbor’s racket, but his shithead neighbor had quite sensibly cleared out for the week. 

The shop was starting to fill up, and the barista was starting to glare at him, so Eddie reluctantly packed up his things and stepped out onto the street. He wandered for a bit, no destination in mind, and found himself staring out over the bay.

He barely even knew Venom, he reminded himself again. They’d only been together for one day. 

Well, it had been a hell of a day.

\---

There was an ever-present feeling of dying: of hosts dying, of Venom dying. It raced from human to human like the plague, and with each transfer it grew more frantic. No memory of Eddie, or of Anne, or anyone it had seen that night. It wished it had paid more attention to their surroundings and Eddie’s memories of the city, instead of just relying on the human to navigate. 

If wishes were horses, its host thought, unsure where the idea had sprung from. If wishes were horses, Venom would not be so hungry. There was a lot of meat on a horse.

The creature they had caught was scrawny and hairy and fought like the devil, but Venom needed living meat. It was no longer strong enough to manifest around its host, so it was reduced to using the host’s pathetic teeth and nails to tear the animal apart. Revulsion soured the host’s stomach and Venom suppressed its reflex to vomit.

It wondered, for the first time, if Eddie would even want it back. Or would he be revolted too?

\---

Eddie was in the coffee shop again. 

His apartment was livable now: as clean as it would ever be, with glass in the windows and a sturdy table and chairs set he’d gotten for cheap on craigslist. He still couldn’t stand to be there.

He’d just accepted a new job offer, writing for Query, an off-beat but respected local paper that had a reputation for asking hard questions. It was perfect fit. He started in four days. He should be more excited.

He clicked the next email. Another interview request. He deleted it. He’d done a few already, but only because he was desperate for the money. This time, he could afford to say no.

He opened another email. Details about his first appointment in court. He’d given the police the full story—even the parts about Venom. After all, it was dead. No point in protecting it. He pushed the thought out of his mind. The Life Foundation would finally face consequences for its actions. He would probably get a settlement, down the road. More importantly, there would be justice for Maria and the other victims of their experiments. 

He took another sip of his watery americano. His life was back on track, better than before. Time to move on, he told himself. He glanced up at the T.V. in the corner, looking for a distraction.

“I’m tellin’ you, I’m not crazy! It made me eat the cat!”

“A, uh, ‘black tar demon,’ made you eat a cat?”

He didn't really come to a decision. He just pulled on his coat and snapped the laptop shut. 

\---

The human collapsed in a back alley, coughing and retching. Her body burned with fever. Venom as bad off as she was: sick and starving after a long string of terrible hosts. It was too weak to control her now. 

Still, it could have stayed, consumed her organs until it found a better option. Why should it care if this human died? 

It remembered Eddie’s grief for Maria. It let the woman go. 

She vomited up a slew of black slime and fled. 

A crow swooped down to investigate the puddle. 

\---

The man on the television had been a dead end. Eddie had tracked down the reporter, called in a long-expired favor to get the man’s address, and wrangled from him a description of the symbiote’s next host. 

By some miracle, he had managed to track the woman for a while, interrogating passersby, following a trail of strange encounters. Then, abruptly, the trail dried up. 

No, no one had seen a tall, dark-skinned woman in a green shirt passing this way. No, no one talking to themselves or eating live animals. No, no sign of black slime or tentacles. No, no, no, no, no.

Eddie ignored their alarmed or pitying looks and kept walking. 

\---

The body was growing cold. 

For almost two weeks, Venom had hung on. But it couldn't find Eddie. It couldn't even find a halfway decent host. 

For now, the carcass of its most recent carrier was shielding it from the toxic atmosphere outside, but the oxygen was already taking a toll, and without living cells to absorb it, Venom wouldn't last long. 

It struggled to hold onto its last threads of coherent thought. 

\---

It was getting dark. The streetlights flickered on.

Today was the third day of this wild goose chase. The third day of desperately scanning the news. The third day of zigzagging around the city. The third day of minimal sleep and eating street food as he walked.

His leads had only gotten thinner as time wore on. He had come halfway across the city to this street corner based on nothing more than a mention of a bird flying erratically. Shockingly, it had been a dead end.

Tomorrow was his first day of work. He was trying not to think about it.

He stepped around a dead pigeon lying on the sidewalk. 

Then, on impulse, he turned back. 

It was only a piece of roadkill. But just in case.

\---

Out of nowhere, Venom felt the warmth of a living body, like a lighthouse in a storm. It crawled blindly towards it. 

\---

Eddie felt something stir inside the grimy corpse. Please, please, please—

He cradled the dead bird against his chest.

\---

It slid beneath the skin, burrowing its way toward the heat of the core. 

\--- 

Eddie tossed the empty body on the pavement.

\---

It tucked the last shred of itself into the crevice between heart, lungs, and liver before finally letting consciousness slip away.

\---

He sat down heavily on the steps of the house behind him. 

Venom was there. 

Venom was lifeless and silent. 

Eddie could feel their bond, but it felt... incomplete. Fragile. A gossamer thread of connection. 

He rested his head on his knees and let waves of relief and worry wash over him until the owner of the house came to chase him away.

\---

For eight days, there was darkness, marked only by warmth and bitter hunger. 

\---

Eddie ate tater tots and raw shellfish and anything else he could get his hands on. With no way of knowing what nutrients a half-dead alien symbiote required, he threw things at the wall and hoped something would stick. 

But even if it worked, a voice in his head reminded, Venom had said it needed a healthy bond to survive. There was no telling if the tentative link they had now would be enough. 

\---

Venom awoke to a cavernous hunger, its thoughts still little more than an assortment of needs and impulses. It devoured everything within reach.

\---

There was a stabbing pain in his abdomen. God, he felt like shit. Eddie staggered into the bathroom and fished a bottle of ibuprofen out of the cabinet. He was fumbling with the child-safe cap when it struck him that this might be a good sign. In a sense.

By the end of the week, his health had disintegrated. Nausea and exhaustion were unrelenting. His stomach and feet began to swell. His heart raced even when he was lying down. 

His new boss kicked him out of the office and insisted he check himself into an emergency room, but Eddie didn’t bother. He vividly remembered Dan telling him last time that there was nothing he could do. Even if they separated now, half a dozen major organs were failing at once.

Venom would recover soon, he told himself as he climbed the stairs to his apartment. He paused at the landing, hands on his knees, while he caught his breath. Venom had to recover soon.

 _You die, I die,_ he thought to it.

\---

Gradually, Venom became aware of a weight pressing on its consciousness from without. As its mind slowly pieced itself back together, the pressure resolved itself into an emotion: concern. 

\---

Eddie had fallen into the habit of checking in on Venom constantly throughout the day: researching, showering, washing dishes, his mind would flicker to the bond, just to reassure himself it was still there. 

Two weeks after finding Venom, as he sat on his bed folding laundry, he checked again.

\---

Venom felt a flicker of attention brush against it. It turned its own attention to the source, but it was too weak to extend its senses. The feeling slipped away.

\--- 

Eddie froze. “Venom?” There was no response. He tried to reach across the bond. It was tenuous, but at the other end there was unmistakably a hazy, flickering consciousness.

Eddie’s hands tightened on the shirt he had been folding.

\---

The surge of thought and emotion was too much for the choked bond. Like a weather vane in the wind, the it snapped into place.

The tide washed over Venom, sweeping it down into darkness.

\---

Through the newly reinforced bond, Eddie sensed that Venom had lapsed into a kind of hibernation. 

He took a long, deep breath. For the first time, he realized how little of Venom was left: a few tablespoons of black goo, tucked away between his lungs. But gut instinct told him that Venom was out of the woods now. It would only get better from here.

\---  
Venom woke, and for the first time in almost a month, its mind was clear.

It stretched out through the host body, twining along nerves and blood vessels. It tasted a familiar mix of antigens and hesitated. That couldn’t be right. It couldn’t be that lucky.

**EDDIE?**

There was no answer.

It wove through the major systems, confirming he was alive and safe. Body temperature was a little low. Heartbeat and breathing were slow but regular. It reached into his central nervous system and felt deep delta waves pulsing along his neurons. He was asleep. He was fine.

The internal organs were not fine; they were shot all to hell. Its own doing, Venom realized. It launched into repairs. It was still too weak to heal them properly, but it would set right as much as it could.

\---

Mid-morning sunlight seeped through Eddie’s eyelids. Saturday. He put an arm over his face and tried to go back to sleep.

 **EDDIE!** Something wrapped around his heart and squeezed.

He jerked upright as pain shot through his back and arms. His head spun. Distantly, he recognized the signs of a heart attack. 

**EDDIE!** the voice exclaimed again, this time with a note of panic. The pain and pressure faded. Eddie shook his head, trying to orient himself. 

**SORRY. I WAS EXCITED.**

He squinted into the sunlight spilling through the window. “Venom?”

**YES!**

“Holy shit, you’re awake!” 

**SO ARE YOU!**

“Holy shit,” he said again. “Buddy, you had me worried. You doin' okay?”

 **STILL WEAK,** Venom informed him, **BUT GETTING BETTER.**

Eddie wished he knew how to communicate his elation and relief, how much he had missed it and feared for it, how— He felt a presence in his mind, and knew that Venom was replaying his memories, sharing in his emotions. He saw flickers of its memories in turn, and knew that it had missed him, too.

Eddie laughed as Venom curled around their chest. It enjoyed that, the tug of their intercostal muscles, the quick expansions and contractions of their ribs: that was what happiness felt like. 

Eddie rubbed the sleep out of their eyes. “What do you say we get some breakfast, V? I could eat a horse.”

**YOU SHOULD WISH FOR ONE.**

“Huh?”

**NOT IMPORTANT. BREAKFAST IS GOOD.**

“Great; your choice.” 

It did a quick assessment of chemical shortages: magnesium, phosphorus, riboflavin, niacin, homocysteine. It sorted through memories of Eddie’s dietary experiments over the past couple weeks.

 **FISH AND PISTACHIOS,** it declared. **NO COOKING.** And then, because it was tired of surviving and wanted to have something for the sake of enjoyment, it added, **WITH HOT CHOCOLATE.**

Eddie laughed again. “You got it, buddy.”

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from [Isle Dans La Mer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZO_U9_S8Cs), by Sweet Crude. I didn't base the fic on that song, but I was listening to it while editing and I realized, damn, I might as well have.  
> I also took (or tried to take) some stylistic notes from [Within the Wires](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXYmEVI5qeQ), a podcast of meditation tapes laced with mild body horror and dystopian romance. Highly recommend it. I might do something more directly inspired by that in the future, playing off the whole meditation thing in the movie. We'll see.
> 
> I'm doing nanowrimo, focusing on a different project, so it could be a little while before I add to this series again, but I do want to come back to it eventually.


End file.
